Exporting email to new provider

Dear Geeks!
I'm seriously considering moving my email to another service. Due to gmail's unsteady privacy issues, and formatting problems. These issues have compounded lately I would like to move to another provider. However, I would like to keep the emails I have received already within gmail, without having to risk having all that disappearing when the account gets closed. I hope there is some shortcut to doing this without having to copy each message cut and paste. I see nothing about this issue in MG forums or elsewhere. Is there a simple solution?

Thanks in advance. Geek on!

 

You could setup Thunderbird as an email client and download all of the emails to your computer. It won't forward them to your new account but at least you will have them. Thunderbird may also work for your new service as well depending on the service you go to. I have it setup to handle 4 email accounts at the same time. It works well. I can even reply to an email received in one account through a different account.

You want to set it up as a pop account so it will download everything. As I recall, imap only links to the Google mail server without really downloading the mail.

 

That's not true. If an IMAP email account is set up in an email client such as Thunderbird, the mail does get downloaded to the user's hard drive, same as with a POP account. But, unless smileycrossbones has a specific reason to enable IMAP with his gmail account, I'd use POP to get the messages downloaded to Thunderbird or whatever email client you decide to use; POP would be the easier way to go.

Alternatively, see whether the new email service that you choose has an import feature that would allow you to import messages from another email service.

 

I accept your explanation. I am by no means an expert in the various protocols used for email and maybe the issue was something specific to my individual setup but I did setup a gmail account in Thunderbird and it seemed to import all of the folders from the gmail account and they were in italics, pop setup doesn't do that. I never tried it but I assumed them to be simply links to the gmail folders because they were in italics. It actually surprised me that TB defaulted to imap when I setup the account. I deleted the account and recreated it as a pop account and all is normal. I have to say that it may have downloaded the emails, I never tried it off line.